Hancock, the longest-serving minister in cabinet, has been deputy premier to Redford, who is resigning effective Sunday.

Hancock, who supported Redford as she tried to weather the turmoil around her, had said he wouldn’t mind taking on the interim role for continuity’s sake, but he said he didn’t want the job permanently.

Hancock said he didn’t think he was the best long-term choice for a party that says it wants to turn over a new page.

“If we’re going to show the party as moving forward, I’m probably not the guy who epitomizes that.”

Caucus members were meeting to pick an interim leader on Thursday.

“What we need is some stability as we go through the process of leadership selection,” Hancock said Thursday as he was going into the meeting. “It’s steady as she goes.”

Others were ruling out a run at the top spot: service Alberta Minister Doug Griffiths, who ran in the 2011 leadership race that Redford won, said he isn’t interested in doing that again. He said he has family considerations that need his attention.

He agreed with Hancock that the Tories need to carry on with their agenda.

“We have a fantastic budget. We have the best policies and we’re going to carry on down that road.”

At least a couple of other ministers were hedging their bets Thursday.

Finance Minister Doug Horner said it was too early to say for sure, but he wasn’t ruling out another run at the leadership. Horner was one of the top contenders in the race that Redford won.

“I’ve made no decisions about my future at this point in time,” Horner said. “Yesterday was a bit of a shock for a lot of people and we are going to take stock and make some decisions in the future about my future.”

And Employment Minister Thomas Lukaszuk, who never publicly supported Redford as she was dealing with caucus unrest, wasn’t discounting his own run.

He dismissed suggestions from the opposition that the party’s leadership race — the third in eight years — will distract from the business of government. “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Redford’s resignation followed weeks of open caucus fighting stemming from her lavish travel expenses and from disillusionment with her and the direction of her government.

The outgoing premier joined Thursday’s caucus meeting about an hour in, accompanied by her daughter Sarah.

The Tories have now run through three premiers in seven years. They’ve worked their way through the populist Ralph Klein, rural Ed Stelmach and big-city sophisticate Alison Redford. Any of the three, left to themselves, might well have won the next election but weren’t given the chance, because the party apparatus — the riding presidents, party leaders and an agitated caucus — weren’t willing to risk it. They’ve been running Alberta for 43 years and won’t abide even the slightest danger that their gig might be in danger. Klein — who only made the province fat, rich and debt-free — was directed toward the exit when his numbers fell just a tad, to a point that would delight any other premier. Stelmach lasted less than three years after winning an overwhelming majority and 75% support in a leadership review. Redford didn’t even make it that long. Read more…

PC party president Jim McCormick, said the steps for choosing a new leader are to be discussed Monday at a board of directors meeting in Red Deer. He said the party constitution requires a leadership race to be at least four months long, but no longer than six months.

The province, by law, must hold its next election sometime in the spring of 2016.

Redford announced her decision at suppertime Wednesday in the rotunda of the legislature, 29 months after she stood at the same spot to take the oath of office.

She said the turmoil had taken an intolerable toll and was proving an insurmountable distraction to the business of government.

The spiral to Wednesday’s resignation began weeks ago, when it surfaced that Redford had spent $45,000 on first-class air tickets and a government plane to go to Nelson Mandela’s funeral in South Africa with an aide.

Other revelations fell like hammer blows: Redford using government planes for a vacation; to fly her daughter and her daughter’s friends around; to go to a family funeral in Vancouver.

There were calls for her to repay the money for the South Africa trip. She refused to do so for weeks and only relented after tensions within her caucus spilled into the public realm.

She was punished in the polls. Some indicated that as many as four out of five Albertans had turned thumbs down on her leadership and preferred the Opposition Wildrose as the next government.

Last week, things went from bad to worse when Redford’s character came into question. Calgary backbencher Len Webber quit the Tory caucus. He said he could not longer stomach Redford’s temper tantrums and abuse of subordinates. He called her a bully and said she was “not a nice lady.”

An Edmonton PC riding association president suggested last Friday that the party could not win the next election with Redford as leader.

On Sunday, 10 government members met to debate whether to leave caucus and sit as Independents.

On Monday, Donna Kennedy-Glans, associate minister for electricity, quit, saying promised reforms by Redford were dying on the vine.

But opposition leaders say Redford was merely the symptom of a PC government that has rotted from within after more than four decades in power.

Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith said it’s a party that craves power for its own sake, which is why it now turfs leaders at the slightest whiff of trouble.